It’s NOT, as some over at gocomics are opining, that Hammy is really evil and wants to eat his friends. It’s just a lame gag about how RJ and Verne are the real chocolate covered nuts. The problem is there’s no bridge between the word “nuts” in the second panel and visual pun in the last panel.

Like this:

I use puns all the time. But I’m not proud of it. Puns are the laziest form of comedy. But they’re reliable. Like a John Williams score in a Spielberg movie (laid on like butter on a butter croissant), puns bypass the thinking parts of the brain and go straight for the gut. You laugh, but then you’re brain catches up and says, “Why am I laughing at a simple letter substitution that retains the sound of a word, but changes it’s meaning in a mildly surprising way?” Brains can be very wordy.

It’s a forced laugh. And as any Tea Bagger will tell you, shoving comedy down our throats is just one more banana peel pratfall down the slippery slope to being body-snatched by Sweden. First puns, then forced blondenization and then we’ll all be ending every sentence like a question? And…